🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {